Chapter 46.3: War with the Oruks - Enemy at the Gates!
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month IX: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 9th Month
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Besieging the Chiefdom
Agroba da Kill Mongar had not survived long enough to turn into what he is now just by being a stupid angry warmongering Oruk, he actually uses his brain.
He had made one decision that looked, from an outsider's perspective, like pure aggression — chase the enemy force that had been bleeding them from the shadows, drive them away from the area, and then turn the full weight of what remained of his horde toward the beastfolk chiefdom before the supply shortage became a crisis that could not be managed. Two birds, as the saying went, with one very large and angry stone. The force that had been harassing them was now running away fifty kilometers in the wrong direction, exhausted and depleted, and the chiefdom ahead was now facing whatever was left of the Berdeng Oruk war host without the strange masked devils who had cost them so much.
By the time the Southern Beastmen Tribes' Chiefdom saw the tree line darken and the first siege engines roll into the open ground before their walls, August's team was still a full day's hard march away.
The walls of the chiefdom were not the carved stone fortifications of human construction. They were a different kind of engineering entirely — massive timber frames reinforced with packed earth and stone fill, shaped by people who understood the materials the forest provided and had been building with them for generations. They lacked the architectural grandeur of the great human walls August had seen in his travels, but they had their own logic, their own defensive intelligence, and — more to the point — they had been built by a group of people who expected to defend them at some point. The chiefdom's warriors manned the ramparts with the readiness of soldiers who had been preparing for this moment since the first probe attack, and the reserves that Chief Midoka had organized in the days since were already in position behind them.
The Oruks looked at the beastfolks' puny walls and decided they did not care.
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The Siege Machines
They had brought their own equipment. The battering rams were enormous, fitted with reinforced heads and carried on wheeled frames by teams of Oruks whose job was to absorb the arrows and whatever else fell on them from above and keep the ram moving. The trebuchets were rougher in construction than anything a human siege engineer would have recognized as polished, but they were functional, and functional was the only relevant quality Oruks would care for when they were standing in front of a wall you intended to go through.
The first volley launched within minutes of the siege line establishing itself.
Rocks, mostly. Large ones, on wide arcs that carried them over the walls and into the interior of the chiefdom or against the walls themselves. The impacts were significant — the sound of stone meeting timber at that velocity was not subtle, and the first rounds were enough to drop sections of walkway and send warriors scrambling for better cover. The beastfolk on the walls returned what they could — arrows, thrown weapons, the particular ingenuity of people defending a home they had no intention of surrendering easily to invaders — but the trebuchet range kept the siege machines largely outside the effective distance for most of what the defenders were working with.
Then the second volley came.
The stones in this volley were different. They were the same weight, the same approximate shape, but something clung to them that was not just rock and was not fire. A darkness that was not quite visible, more of an impression in the air around the projectiles, something that the eye registered and the rest of the senses disagreed about.
Chaos magic.
Among the ten thousand Oruk warriors that Agroba had brought to this fight, five of them could use it. The number represents a one in a million chance of the rough statistical occurrence of an Oruk born to be capable of wielding significant magical power, which made those five individuals among the most protected and most valued members of the entire war host. They were called Warlocks, the Oruk tradition's answer to the spellcasters of other species, and what they wielded was not any system of magic that human scholarship had cleanly categorized. It was a mana that had been deliberately corrupted, shaped by generations of Oruk Warlock tradition into something that served the species' nature — chaotic, consuming, and deeply unpleasant to be near if you were anything other than an Oruk.
What chaos magic did at low proficiency was not kill you immediately. That was what made it particularly insidious.
It corrupted the mana around it. Not in a way that burned or froze or struck — it was in a way that slowly crept its way to your vital organs. The stones laced with it carried the corruption outward from their impact points like a slow stain, spreading into the ambient mana of the air, the ground, the very bodies of the people standing nearby. Every living being possessed mana in some form, processed through different biological structures depending on species. For beastfolk, this was the mana core — the dense, mana-rich organ deep in the body that processed ambient mana from the environment into the internal power that fueled their strength, their instincts, their healing. For humans, the equivalent was the mana heart, the terminology varying by region and tradition. For creatures that operated through innate magical connection, it was the wellspring of everything they could do.
Chaos magic went after those structures. Slowly. Patiently. It began with the mana around it, corrupting the ambient field and then working inward to whatever was drawing from that field. The effect on the people near the impact zones was not dramatic. It was quiet. A weakness that settled into the limbs. A heaviness that was not quite exhaustion but was impossible to distinguish from it. Strength leaving by degrees, as if the body was forgetting how to hold it.
If the corruption managed to reach its completion — if it fully consumed the ambient mana inside the person and moved inward to the mana core or mana heart itself — the outcomes were not good. At best, total physical collapse. At worst, the corrupted vessel turned violent, the creature's own power working against it, against the people around it, with none of the judgment or control that had governed it before. The beastfolk had a word for this kind of ruin. It was not a word anyone used lightly.
The beastfolk warriors on the walls had no concept of understanding on what was happening to them, because no one who fought Oruks had ever survived long enough to study what their specialized Warlocks' units powers actually did, it was not a widespread information that is common knowledge. From what few records existed — for those few scholars who were determined enough and foolish enough to chase the subject — showed a narrow pattern of survivors: first are those who wielded the light elements had consistently shown immunity or near-immunity to the corruption of chaos magic. Those who wielded the darkness element showed reduced vulnerability, perhaps only five to ten percent of the normal potency could affect them, for reasons that even the scholars who noted the pattern had not successfully explained. And those with sufficiently deep understanding of their own mana systems and how their bodies function had occasionally managed to expel or purify the corruption before it progressed.
Oruks themselves were entirely immune to their powers as they were built from it. It was their native dark element carried to its logical extreme that produced chaos magic.
Nobody outside their species knew this.
The Warlocks were too well-protected for anyone to have captured and studied one. And the dead did not explain their secrets.
Agroba da Kill Mongar watched the second volley's effects from his command position with the patience of something that had learned to wait for a result it was already certain of. The warriors on the walls were going to lose their strength, not dramatically, not yet, but it was already happening albeit incrementally. He had enough chaos-laced stone projectiles for the sustained barrage he needed. Not an unlimited supply — that was the damage the cowardly enemy had done to them with their night raid — but it was enough.
The barrages continued, mixing standard stone with chaos-laced stone in patterns that stretched the Warlocks' capacity without breaking it.
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The Empty Camp
August and Bren flew ahead of the rest of the team, their goal was simply to scout the enemy camp ahead.
The recovery march had begun at first light, pace set at something the most depleted members could sustain without breaking down entirely. The Grimfangs ran alongside at the ground-level equivalent of a determined trot. Finnester and Kirpy covered the distance overhead in the longer-range scouting sweeps that gave them information before the main group needed to make decisions about it.
August had wanted to know if the enemy camp was still operational.
It was not.
The forward war camp of the Berdeng Oruks, when Bren and August swept it from altitude, it has long been empty in the specific way that places were abandoned when they had been left in a hurry with intent. The embers of the camping fires are still breathing their last. Equipment abandoned that was too heavy to carry and not important enough to delay the march for. The massive structure at the center — whatever had housed Agroba during the campaign — had been dismantled down to its frame and taken as much as could be moved. What remained was the debris of an army that had decided waiting was no longer the strategy.
They messaged back toward the group that was on the ground and told them to make pace towards the chiefdom.
The report was brief.
"The camp is cleared. I assume they are already besieging the chiefdom."
The implication required no elaboration. If the camp was empty and the entire Oruk force had marched, then the timing calculation was simple and unpleasant: the Oruks had moved at night or dawn, the chiefdom was well within their reach, and the combined Talon teams were fifty kilometers in the wrong direction with a day's travel ahead of them at current pace.
August had understood even before seeing the empty camp what had driven the decision. The supply raid had been more successful than they had allowed for in terms of strategic effect. Sixty percent of the war supplies gone in a single night meant that the leader (Agroba) could not afford to wait for the situation to improve. Two options remained: retreat to his own territory and accept the campaign as a failure, or commit everything he had left to taking the chiefdom before the shortage became a total disaster for them. An Oruk king who had achieved the highest color ranking and strength in the horde did not survive to lead a host by choosing retreat when the alternative was still on the table.
"He's smarter than he looks," Bren said, from somewhere above and to the left.
"Most things are, we just don't give them enough credit for it," August replied.
He had to give the Oruks' decision its credit. It may be stupid from one angle. Committed and functionally correct from another. In a perverse way, the supply raid had forced exactly the move that was most dangerous for the chiefdom, because it had closed the window on the alternative.
He put the thought aside and thought about what they were walking toward instead.
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Siege Warfare Experience
But there was one thing about the Berdeng Oruks that Agroba was not able to account for, because he had no reason to believe such a threat existed, sure he had felt a strong enemy attack their camp before, but his arrogance states that he was stronger.
But the people coming toward his siege line from behind fifty kilometers away from the chiefdom had fought the Beast Dominion War.
All of the old Talon One members and all of Talon Two — they had been through a conflict that would have disabused Agroba of any assumptions he held about what a challenging opponent looked like. The Beast Dominion War had pitted them against creatures that would make the ten thousand elite Oruk warriors look pale in comparison. Guardian beasts. Beast Lords with territory measured in tens of thousands of square kilometers. Forces that did not break morale, did not respond to fear effects, did not tire, and did not stop until the thing opposing them was no longer capable of opposing anything.
The people who had survived that came out of it having learned things about fighting a siege combat, about fighting from walls and breaking sieges from outside, about what panic looked like in a force and how to manufacture it deliberately, that most professional military commanders acquired only after decades of campaigns. They had acquired all of it, under conditions that did not permit the luxury of learning slowly.
Oruks were frightening indeed. But they were not the beasts of the Beast Dominion War.
August ran the numbers while they marched. The chiefdom's forces were good defenders. Chieftain Midoka had thoroughly prepared — he had taken August's warning about a follow-on attack seriously and had positioned his reserves, organized the evacuation of non-combatants who could not fight, and used the time since the probe attack to close the gaps in the wall coverage. Chieftain Midoka was not a man who needed things explained twice.
The Warrior Heroes would be on the walls. The thirty chieftains would have their clan warriors in position. Seven thousand trained beastfolk fighters were not going to fold the moment the trebuchets started throwing rocks.
But the chaos-laced stones were a different problem. If the Berdeng Oruks had their Warlocks — and historically they always did, their most carefully protected assets — then the defenders were being slowly weakened by something they could not diagnose or counter on their own. A force being drained by something invisible was a force that would eventually break regardless of its discipline, because the body did not care about the will's instructions once the mana that powered both was gone.
They needed to break the siege from the outside. Rear pressure, disruption of the siege line, force Agroba to split attention between the walls in front of him and whatever was arriving at his back. The principle was not complicated. The execution, given their current state of exhaustion and depleted supplies, was going to require everyone to be better than they felt like being today.
They had done harder things with less.
"Let's pick up the pace," August said.
Nobody complained. They had figured out from his expression when he came back from the empty camp that the next several hours were not going to be the kind of situation that rewarded complaints.
They began to move faster.
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At the Walls
Back at the chiefdom, the walls held.
For now.
The beastfolk warriors near the chaos-laced impact points were slowing down in ways they could not account for or explain. They were not weak fighters. They were not breaking from fear or loss of nerve. The strength was simply leaving their limbs with the patience of something that did not need to hurry, and the warriors they continued fighting despite it, because the beastfolk who stood on the walls of their home when those walls were under attack had only one available response to that situation, to defend it even if their death would be the final outcome.
The drums on the towers beat the reserve call patterns. The Beastmen Warrior Heroes moved through the positions, shoring up sections where their positions were starting to weaken as most visible, buying time with the depth of their own individual capability. Chief Midoka was on the walls himself, because there was no other place for a chieftain to be. His presence on the ramparts produced the specific steadiness that came from seeing the most powerful person in the room still standing and still fighting, which was not inspiration so much as a very direct communication that the situation had not yet reached the point where the most capable person here had decided it was over.
The battering rams had reached the main gate. That was a different category of problem than the trebuchets.
The gate was an old timber, reinforced in the days since August's warning, braced from the inside by everything that could be brought to bear. It was a great engineering work done quickly. It was also being hit repeatedly by several tons of iron-capped wood driven by the collective weight of Oruks who were not thinking about anything except putting it through.
The gate was going to hold for a while longer yet.
Whether a while longer was enough depended entirely on how fast fifty kilometers could be covered by people who were already tired and chose not to care about that.